


Down to Your Stolen Bones

by Atlas_M_33



Category: Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure (Cartoon), Tangled (2010)
Genre: F/M, POV Alternating, Secret Santa, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, my longstanding love affair with commas and paragraph breaks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-26
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 13:22:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21970021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Atlas_M_33/pseuds/Atlas_M_33
Summary: Eugene FitzherbertFlynn Rider has spent his life running away from the words on his chest.Rapunzel thinks her words are the most romantic thing she’s ever read.
Relationships: Eugene Fitzherbert | Flynn Rider/Rapunzel
Comments: 12
Kudos: 265





	Down to Your Stolen Bones

**Author's Note:**

> This was a Secret Santa gift for Judai on the fizfam Discord server. They requested newdream, so I decided to continue my personal tradition of writing sappy soulmate AUs as Christmas presents.
> 
> I hope you enjoy, this was a blast to work on!
> 
> (And thanks to the mods for putting this event together!!)

It’s dark outside the day the boy who will become Eugene Fitzherbert is born to a mother who will only get to hold her son one time. 

During those five minutes, she will cradle him so that his delicate head rests on her shoulder and she will twirl a wisp of fine dark hair between her trembling fingers and she will tell him how very much she loves him. Her husband will burst into the room, and when he sees her, pale and shaking and clutching their boy, he will stumble to her bedside and tell her that she’s amazing, and he loves her, and that the child in her arms is perfect in every way. 

He will smile down at her and say, “He’s going to be the best of us.” and the Queen will reply with “He’s going to be even better than that.” and a kiss to his forehead. She will smile one more time, and then her eyes will slip closed forever. 

The King will stifle a sob, take his son into his arms, and ignore the burning along his ribs as the words there fade from dark blue to pale gray. Instead, he will look at his son, his heir, the only thing left of his wife, and he will read the delicate words scripted across Eugene’s chest just under his left collar bone.

Then he will hand the baby to a wet nurse, evacuate his kingdom, and spend the next 25 years haunting his own castle and mourning his soulmate.

Eugene, of course, won’t know about any of this.

The first time Rapunzel reads her words she is five years old and she has just finished the book of fairy tales that Mother brought for her birthday. In it there is a story about a Prince who only wants to marry his true love, so the good fairy puts words on his skin that will change when he falls deep into the forever kind. And then he goes travelling, meets a Princess, and lives happily ever after.

When Rapunzel finishes her story she creeps down the stairs, careful not to trip on her hair, and manages to twist herself around enough to read the words that curl at the base of her neck, right next to the brown lock of hair that Mother doesn’t like to look at.

She decides right there that she is going to love whoever says them to her very much, because they’re sweeter even than the ones in all her stories.

She doesn’t tell Mother that, though. Mother thinks that fairy tales are silly.

Eugene Fitzherbert is 13 and this is what he knows about himself: He was found on the steps of the orphanage as a baby, and no one knows where he came from. He has a soulmark scrawled on the left side of his chest, just over his heart, and he doesn’t want to meet the person it belongs to. And one day he’s going to leave all of this behind. He’s going to steal his way out of this kingdom and he’s going to run until all his problems disappear and not even the sun can catch him.

But he’s not quite ready for that yet, so for now he sits on the floor of the common room with the younger kids gathered around, and he reads them the Tales of Flynnigan Rider, and he thinks that Flynn isn’t a bad name at all.

His name is the first thing he steals, and it’s far from the last, but it is the thing he holds onto the longest.

Rapunzel is turning 18 and she has all but forgotten about meeting her soulmate. There are more important things on her mind, like reading, and painting, and finally finding out what the floating lights are. So maybe the conversation she has with Mother doesn’t go the way she wants it to, but that’s okay, because she has a thief in her closet, and his stolen crown under her staircase and a plan.

Nothing can go wrong. 

Flynn Rider is a thief who has just pulled the job of a lifetime, and the words that loop across his skin are a part of the person he won’t let himself be. Those words belong to Eugene, after all, and Flynn hasn’t been Eugene in years. So he takes Blondie to the Snuggly Duckling in the hopes that he’ll be rid of her, and one song, an underground tunnel and a near death experience later he finds out exactly why she’s been stashed away in that tower her whole life. 

And then, when she pulls back the curtain of hair that trails behind her, showing him the short brown lock that’s invisible otherwise, he sees it. It’s a part of her soulmark, a scratchy _M_ etched into her skin. Eugene’s mark aches sharply, but he brushes the pain aside in favor of giving Rapunzel his name. His _real_ name this time, against everything that he’s ever learned during his years as a thief. 

The next time his mark throbs he smiles through the pain in his chest, because he knows it’s already too late. It’s too easy to love her, this girl made of solid sunshine, and it just might kill him to take her back to her tower at the end of this. But that’s okay, because he’s dangerous, and far away from him is the best place for her to be.

When Rapunzel starts singing in the middle of the pub she’d be the first to point out that she has no idea what she’s doing, provoking the patrons of the bar. As it turns out, she must be doing something right, because they’re having just as much fun as she is. 

Her performance is a double edged sword, though, because it’s also the moment she accepts that no matter how she feels about him, there’s no way that Flynn Rider is going to be the one to say the words that loop delicately a few inches below her hairline. He doesn’t believe in dreams, and he certainly isn’t a romantic.

Hours later, sitting between a fire and a river, he tells her his name, and she changes her mind.

When they arrive at the main gates, there’s still plenty of time to kill before the lanterns go up at dusk, and there’s no shortage of things to do in the meantime. The path they cut through town winds nonsensically as they follow whatever happens to catch Rapunzel’s eye, ducking past guards all the while. There’s chalk art in the street and cupcakes enjoyed through smothered giggles and a dance in the main square that ends with them pressed flush together, high on the energy of the crowd and each other. Eugene’s been to this festival a half dozen times, but he’s never experienced it like this before. 

He ends the best day of his life in a boat on the water. Rapunzel is breathtaking, the light of the lanterns that she wanted to see so badly wrapping around her like stolen sunlight. She looks at him and sees an orphaned boy telling stories and not a thief that climbed her tower, but as Eugene pushes her hair out of her eyes he knows down to his bones that she’s the best thing he’s ever stolen. 

He thinks that destiny, or fate, or whatever the hell it is that assigns people their soulmates has gotten it all wrong. The possessive words on his chest that he’s spent his whole life running from for fear of being tied down could never come from the girl sitting in front of him, and that means that his soulmate isn’t his soulmate, because he’s never going to love anyone more than he loves her in this moment.

As the sun sinks towards the horizon Eugene starts moving in the direction of the docks, smiling to himself all the while, though he won’t tell her why even once they get where they’re headed to. He just offers her his hand and helps her into the small rowboat tied to the end of the dock. 

It’s dark out when they finally reach a spot Eugene deems acceptable, and she passes the time dropping flowers in the water to watch them float and trying to get Eugene to share some of his more humorous exploits. He dodges her questions skillfully, turning the conversation back to her anxieties, and when the words _new dream_ leave his lips a shock runs down her spine that feels like destiny. Her breath catches and she thinks, just for a moment, that he might...

But that’s when the first lantern goes up, and suddenly she has other things on her mind. 

Rapunzel spends her eighteenth birthday in a boat on the water, surrounded by the lights that she’s wanted to see her whole life. After the first few moments she barely notices them. Eugene is the only thing she sees, haloed in the glow of a thousand floating candles. He reaches out, brushes a loose lock of hair out of her eyes, and Rapunzel decides that the man sitting in front of her, the one that climbed her tower by accident, that brought her to this magical place made of light, that sees her and not her hair, he has to be the one on her neck. She’s read enough books to know what love looks like on a face, and this version of Flynn, this version of _Eugene,_ is the kind of man that could say her words and mean them more than anything.

And then Eugene takes the crown and leaves her, and on the way back to the tower she realizes that Mother was right all along. 

The man who climbed in her window was not Eugene Fitzherbert. He was a thief on the run with the prize of the century. He was a liar named Flynn Rider who would do anything to get what he wanted. 

Caught up in the euphoria of the lanterns and the way he looked at her, Rapunzel just… forgot that for a moment. 

There’s a part of Eugene, deep down with the other things he doesn’t like to think about, that always knew that one day he’d get in too deep and he’d hang for his crimes. 

But as he’s dragged down the hall of the jail, away from the terrified Stabbington brothers and towards his own death, he knows he’ll be damned if he goes quietly knowing that Rapunzel is in danger. 

Luckily, that’s when he sees the tiny ceramic unicorn, and everything after that seems to fall right into place. 

The realization happens slowly and then all at once, the pieces slotting firmly into place as the suns she’s been painting on her walls start to jump out at her in droves. 

Maybe it’s not her best idea, confronting Mother outright, and maybe she should just wait until nightfall to make her escape, to get back to the castle ~~and Eugene~~ and the kingdom she was stolen from. But she’s been accepting Mother’s word as law for years now, and something in her wants nothing more than for Gothel to watch her walk away. 

When the mirror shatters on the floor Rapunzel feels more powerful than any amount of magic could ever make her, and she turns towards the outside world with that same fire burning in her chest. 

She barely makes it three steps before Mother stops her. 

When Eugene tumbles into Rapunzel’s tower he’s not expecting to take a knife to the gut, though, knowing what he does about Gothel, he really should have. 

Rapunzel is screaming, is trying to claw her way back to him, fierce and beautiful even in his hazy vision. 

It doesn’t matter. Eugene grew up on the street and spent years working his way through the less savory streets of every kingdom, city and town he ever found himself in. He knows a thing or two about knife wounds, and with the amount of blood he can see on the floor and the way everything’s gone cold and fuzzy? 

He’ll be gone before they even reach the bottom of the tower. 

Then Gothel strikes her deal with Rapunzel, and he knows what he has to do. She chains him to the beam and turns her back on the two of them, and she really should’ve known better than to let her guard down in the presence of a man wanted for a dozen assorted crimes in more than three dozen cities. 

Rapunzel is sunshine in human form, and he drinks in the sight of her, lets himself imagine a lifetime of being held this softly and loved this deeply. 

Then he wraps his hand around the glass lying next to him, and with his vision going black around the edges Eugene Fitzherbert greets death with one last smile and one last con. 

The shard of mirror rings out sweetly as it tips out of his hand onto the tile, and Eugene steals Rapunzel from Gothel for good. 

Rapunzel cradles her thief on the floor of the tower she’s spent her whole life hiding in, brushing off his protests even as the dread builds in her heart at the thought of spending the rest of her life with the woman using her for her magic. He groans her name weakly and reaches out, pushes her hair away from her face the same way he did in that boat, a night and a lifetime ago and as he leans up she thinks, just for a moment, that he’s going to kiss her. 

Instead she feels the sharp tug of a hand in her hair and the cool rush of air over the bare skin of her neck. She barely hears the clatter of glass on tile, watching in horror as the brown spreads through the hair that circles the room, watching as Mother leaves the tower through the window one last time. 

When she turns back to Eugene he’s barely breathing, air leaving him in short painful bursts as she sobs out the words of the spell, desperate for a miracle. 

Eugene uses the hand wrapped in hers to turn her face towards him, though she isn’t really paying attention until he says her name. And then-

“You were my new dream.”

He says it with a ghost of a smile on his face, like he’s got everything he could ever want right in front of him, like he’s not bleeding out with every second that passes. The mark on the back of her neck burns, but there are no words to describe the agony in her chest. 

Rapunzel feels tears welling in her eyes as she forces a smile onto her face, cradling his jaw in her hand and finally saying what she’s wanted to since the river. 

“And you were mine.”

Eugene twitches, his eyes going wide for a moment, his smile twisting with joy- 

-then his eyes slip shut, and Rapunzel is alone in her tower again. 

She pushes their foreheads together and sings the last verse of the spell, and as the first tear slips from her cheek she doesn’t notice the glow where it falls, too busy mourning what she never really got to have.

She definitely notices the golden magic that zips through the room though, and the way Eugene’s eyes flutter open with a witty line about brunettes already rolling off his tongue. 

Later, after they drag themselves down the stairs and let Maximus fuss over them all the way to the castle, after they meet the King and Queen and tell the whole story, after Eugene returns her stolen crown with a sheepish smile and an apology, there will be time for them to marvel at the bright gold that their soul marks have changed to. Later there will be time to laugh and cherish and wonder at the magic of it all. 

For now Rapunzel wraps herself around her soulmate, and she gets the first kiss of her happily ever after.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for sticking around! Remember that kudos charge my writing magic and comments cast new content!


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